The first step to accomplishing this was befriending a local merchant.

In moving to Mississippi, Sutpen was also hoping to rise above the quagmires of poverty by becoming an influential patriarch. With the help of a French architect, Sutpen began the construction of a large plantation he named Sutpen’s Hundred, a brazen reference to the hundred square miles of land he just bought. Arriving in Jefferson, Mississippi with a crew of slaves, he purchased a vast tract of land from Old Chickasaw Chief Ikkemotubbe, a member of the local Native American tribe.

In 1833, he moved to Mississippi in search of greener pastures. Born in poverty in West Virginia in 1807, Thomas Sutpen ran away from home when he was just fourteen years-old. In Absalom, Absalom!, Nobel Laureate in Literature William Faulkner explores this theme through the story of Thomas Sutpen. After all, we have the choice to be better than what was. But whilst most see our past as a gauge of our character, it is not by all means a moral compass upon which we must measure ourselves against. Our past is, inevitably, equated to who we are in the contemporary. We constantly hear our past reverberating all over us.

Unfortunately, that is rarely ever the case. We would like to think that our history, that whatever happened in the past remains in the past. Our histories influence how we are perceived by the public. It has been said that our past is an indicator of the present, that its imprints are embedded on us.

Absalom absalom goodreads